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  3. Taking on the Political

Colloquially, 'taking on' means both accepting and challenging. This series provides a space to engage with the expanded field of the political that continues to inspire and provoke critical inquiry and practical intervention. Themes addressed include ethical responsibility and commonality, emerging strategies of governance, subjectivity and power, the legacies of political modernity and the political dimension of postfoundational thought. In addition to engaging with these themes, the series is particularly interested in taking on the conventions through which they are expressed.

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4 results in Taking on the Political

Political Agency and the Medicalisation of Negative Emotions
  • Dan Degerman
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    14 July 2023
    Print publication:
    31 August 2022
  • This book explores negative emotions like anger, fear and grief as important drivers of political action. It examines how treating these feelings as medical problems affects society. Drawing on the political thought of Hannah Arendt, the book develops an original understanding of political emotions as fragile and vulnerable to attacks disputing their relevance to public life. It presents and analyses four case studies of emotional politics in the UK, ranging from assertions that UKIP supporters were emotionally primitive to diagnoses of anxiety disorder in the Brexit referendum's aftermath. It demonstrates how ideas of emotion and mental disorder might be used to both empower and disempower people politically.

Prefigurative Democracy
  • Protest, Social Movements and the Political Institution of Society
  • Mathijs van de Sande
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    13 April 2023
    Print publication:
    31 December 2022
  • In the wake of protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street and the Spanish 15-M movement, the past decade has seen an increased interest in prefigurative politics: the attempt of activists to already realise or embody their ideal of a future society within their own movements and practices. Engaging with the concept and its history, this book establishes a radical-democratic theory of prefiguration. Van de Sande builds on the work of political theorists as diverse as Hannah Arendt, Ernesto Laclau, Claude Lefort, Rosa Luxemburg, and Judith Butler to reveal the radical and representative role of protest and social movements today. He gives various accounts of how prefigurative practices and movements may continue to have political relevance long after they have ended.

Shame
  • A Genealogy of Queer Practices in the 19th Century
  • Bogdan Popa
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    22 December 2017
    Print publication:
    28 April 2017
  • Bogdan Popa brings together Rancière's techniques of disrupting inequality with a queer curiosity in the performativity of shame to show how 19th-century activists embraced certain forms of shame to denaturalise conventional beliefs about sexuality and gender.

Immanence and Micropolitics
  • Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault and Deleuze
  • Christian Gilliam
  • Published by:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Published online:
    22 December 2017
    Print publication:
    27 March 2017
  • Christian Gilliam maps the context and development of immanence and micropolitics, from Sartre to Deleuze. He argues that a philosophy of 'pure' immanence is integral to an alternative understanding of 'the political'; one that re-orients our understanding of the self toward the concept of an unconscious or 'micropolitical' life of desire.